28 November 2013

Still in Southeast Asia

SINGAPORE—I’m still here. At this stage of any long visit, I realise that an enjoyable and productive time will end soon, but I also want to get back home and back to my desk at the University of Hull. Travel is always accompanied by mixed emotions.

The 2nd NUS-NUH International Nursing Conference, which ran parallel to the 18th Malaysia-Singapore Nursing Conference, was a great success. There were 300 delegates from 21 countries, including the United States. I gave my short paper on feeding difficulty in dementia. There is presently no cure for dementia, and, given the familial predisposition to the condition and that it is definitely associated with ageing, I told the audience that the only “cure” was to choose your parents wisely and die young. This very morbid piece of humour always raises a laugh. I was especially pleased to meet Theofanis (Theo) Fotis, PhD, RN, another Greek who works at Brighton University and co-edits the British Journal of Anaesthetic and Recovery Nursing. (It was here in Singapore that I met Alex Molasiotis, PhD, RN, for the first time.)

My birthday night was a great success, and the Indochine restaurant in Gardens by the Bay did not disappoint. The restaurant is themed Indochinese, the definition of which I just learned, and the rooftop bar has a stunning view of the gardens, the bay, and the elegant Marina Bay Sands Hotel. On the hotel’s three curved towers stands a huge overhanging boat-shaped platform, more than 50 storeys high. My wife let them know it was my birthday, and a “cake” duly arrived. Made of Thai crème brûlée with ice cream, with Happy Birthday written in chocolate sauce, it looked and tasted superb.

Happy Birthday to me from the Indochine restaurant.
In addition to the conference presentation I gave on this trip, I have delivered seminars on writing for publication to research students and on good practice in thesis supervision and marking to colleagues. I also delivered the “Trends in Research and Education of Nursing Development in Singapore” (TRENDS) seminar titled “From getting published to getting cited.” In doing so, I discussed the use of the World Wide Web and various kinds of online social media to increase circulation, readership, and citation of published work. A blatant self-publicist, I gave examples from my own use of social media, such as my Twitter page, our faculty Twitter page, the Journal of Advanced Nursing Twitter page, and several sites for tracking publications and citations, including Google Scholar, publicationslist.org, ResearcherID, and ORCID. (Did I leave any out?) I also showed a YouTube video from the excellent Social Media Revolution series on socialnomics, written by Erik Qualman.

Next week, I conclude my seminars with an update on Mokken scaling and some recent developments in this field. While here, I have written and submitted a manuscript with David Thompson, PhD, RN, FRCN, FAAN, of the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Paramedicine at Australian Catholic University in Melboure, Australia and Wenru Wang, PhD, RN, of the Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies at the National University of Singapore. The paper is about the phenomenon of Invariant Item Ordering in Mokken Scales, and we have submitted it to PAID (Personality and Individual Differences). The details of the study will be soporific to most readers of this blog, but I hope it excites the editors and reviewers of PAID. I also wrote the first draft of an article on quantitative research methods for Nursing Standard, to be included in a special feature edited by my fellow tweeter and good friend Leslie Gelling, PhD, RN, of Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge), United Kingdom.

Wenru Wang, PhD, RN, Yours Truly, and Honggu He, PhD, RN, at the HUS-HUH conference.
Running continues, with difficulty. The National University of Singapore has excellent sports facilities on campus, including a full-size running track. This is well used by young students but not by many 58-year olds. I am sure that many of the students are surprised I can still walk. Given that it has been 86 degrees Fahrenheit and 91 percent humidity, I am also surprised. The effort is tremendous, even on the flat, and it’s almost impossible to compensate for the dehydration and salt loss. I convince myself that this is doing me some good, and I have managed to increase my distance to six miles by incorporating a run round the campus, nine laps of the track, and then the local park—all recorded for posterity on my Garmin Forerunner 110 GPS watch (other brands are available).

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.

18 November 2013

Back in Southeast Asia

SINGAPORE—I am not sure if anyone has ever died of jet lag, but if there is a theory related to this, I am testing it to its limit. I have just made my third flight between the U.K. and Hong Kong in a month, and, since the end of September, I have made that journey four times with a round-the-world flight thrown in for fun. I am back in Singapore, the source of another post exactly one year ago, where I will spend four weeks teaching, consulting, and writing. The weather is doing its equatorial best to wear me down, but spending most days in short trousers and short-sleeved shirts is no hardship; I left the U.K. shivering autumnally and preparing for winter.

Bangkok weekend
My first week is over. I’m pleased that my wife has joined me for most of the first two weeks. We both have many friends in the region and none more so than Sally Wai-Chi Chan, PhD, MSc, BSc, RTN, RMN, FAAN, outgoing head of the Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies at the National University of Singapore, and her husband, Bing Shu Cheng, who has been working here in the Ministry of Health. We also have friends in Bangkok, and our first weekend was spent there with Alex Aziz and his family.

Mrs. Watson, Roger Watson, Sally Wai-Chi Chan, and Bing Shu Cheng.
Alex was one of my former students but not of nursing. I used to be a university warden at The University of Edinburgh. The system of wardens is one whereby academic and other staff live with their families in university premises alongside the students. Our role is mainly pastoral, and we are allocated one block or house of several hundred students. Alex, who lived and worked in our residence at Edinburgh in the early 1990s, works with the International Labour Organisation in Bangkok, an agency of the United Nations dedicated to improving the lives of workers across the globe. Alex actually featured in our faculty blog when he met out mutual colleague, Mark Hayter, PhD, RN, FAAN, on a visit to Bangkok.

Distinguished editors
In addition to me, there are two other distinguished editors on campus, and I went to hear them speak about global health at a lunchtime seminar today. They are Richard Horton, BSc, MB, FRCP, FMedSci, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, and Howard Bauchner, M.D., editor-in-chief of JAMA. These were interesting and inspiring talks; neither of these editors of two of the world’s leading medical journals displayed any kind of medical hegemony or superiority regarding their eminent journals.

Howard Bauchner makes a point.
I was interested to hear Bauchner say that JAMA received more than 5,000 submissions annually and publishes only 5 percent of them. He told us how his own interest in global health developed and also discussed difficulties in defining global health. Both editors reflected on the growing importance of noncommunicable diseases and the ethical aspects of global health. 

Richard Horton in action.
Horton explained his vision of global health and how evidence for successful health initiatives could be presented to world leaders. I was especially struck by his vision for The Lancet—that it should be “more than a journal” and how, under some circumstances, The Lancet has acted like an NGO (nongovernmental organisation) in trying to influence the global health agenda and related decision-makers.

In my next post, I’ll be reporting again from Singapore, on the forthcoming 2nd NUS-NUH International Nursing Conference, which runs parallel with the 18th Malaysia-Singapore Nursing Conference. I am giving a paper on research into feeding difficulty in dementia. My wife returns to the U.K. at the end of this week after celebrating my birthday. I’ve chosen the iconic IndoChine restaurant in Gardens by the Bay. As I say, no hardship!

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.